


Are They Really So Different?

by ImPoorlyMade



Series: Are They Really So Different? [1]
Category: Night Vale - Fandom, Welcome to Night Vale, wtnv
Genre: Blood, Cute, Fluff, Gore, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-12 00:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4458350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImPoorlyMade/pseuds/ImPoorlyMade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is based off a prompt I received from tumblr user dorito-and-the-pinetree. It's set in the Desert Otherworld, when Carlos first meets Kevin and is admittedly a little terrified of him. But he soon grows to learn that Kevin is just as big of a dork as Cecil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> My endless apologies for the first chapter being so short. It's Carlos's POV, where he's doing voice recordings on his tape recorder that he obviously carries around with him at all times. The next two chapters will be much longer, I promise!

Day 54 (Approximately)  
“No scientific discoveries to report today, but I have noticed someone, or something following me. I’m not certain what it is, but I’ll get back to you later. The desert is still hot, and very sunny, with weather similar to that of yesterday’s.”

Day 55 (Approximately)  
“I have discovered that the thing following me is a man. He’s still too far away for me to notice much detail, but it almost looks like his clothes have blood stains on them. He doesn’t seem to be injured, and he’s approximately the same height and weight as Cecil. If he’s still following me after a few days, I may approach him, but right now, his presence is very unsettling.”

Day 56 (Approximately)  
“I--I think some sand got--jammed my recording device--may be staticky--I don’t know how much of this--usable--weather is fine--clouds--man is still following--blood--think I’ll go talk to him--try to record--conversation.”

Day 59 (Approximately)  
“The man that I met three days ago is named Kevin. I don’t know how many of my last reports actually recorded, but thankfully Kevin was able to take apart the device and show me a very useful method of how to get the sand out. This should be recording now, but I’ll need to save my space on my tapes, so only really important updates from now on. This man that I met, Kevin, looks almost exactly like Cecil, but there’s something a bit off about him. Maybe it’s the blood stained shirt, I don’t know, but so far he’s still a little frightening. He’s always so happy. It’s odd.”

Day 61 (Approximately)  
“I’m still trying to save my tapes, but it has been what I can only assume would be the timespan of two days. I have discovered things about the desert sand, and most importantly the odd sounds that I have been hearing, but I’ll talk about those things later when I have more full reports on them. Right now I’d just like to say how terrifying this man that I have made ‘friends’ with is. He keeps wanting to kill things and I think he’s been purposely smearing blood on me whenever he gets the chance. I don’t know what’s going on, but he won’t stop talking about some sort of Smiling God. Oh! He even tried to strangle me the other day, and then said it was a ‘hug’ and that he was just being ‘affectionate.’ I don’t know. Things are getting very unusual around here…”

Day 63 (Approximately)  
"Kevin has begun working on some sort of building where we happened to rest. The Army of Masked Giants that I met and reported on earlier have helped provide Kevin with the materials he'll need. He won't tell me what it is, but he keeps saying it's important. I'm actually quite worried, considering his behavior. More on this in a few days."

Day 66 (Approximately)  
"Kevin told me today that what he's building is actually a radio station! He explained to me that he's Cecil's double, and that they had met before, but I had no idea Kevin was a radio host as well! As frightening as he seems, he's just taken a break from building, and I've asked him to tell me a bit about the station. Hang on." There are shuffling sounds, before a second voice cuts in.  
"Oh, hi Carlos! You wanted me to tell you about the radio station, right?"  
"Yes, just tell me why you're building it way out here, and what purpose you think it will serve in the Desert Otherworld... community."  
"Well I need someplace to work, of course! You can't be productive if you can't work, and if you can't be productive, then what value do you have? I wanted to be able to send broadcasts out to tell people all about the Smiling God. It'll be so perfect once I get it set up! I can help everyone see the light."  
"Right. Thank you, Kevin." There are more shuffling sounds, and then a few seconds of silence. "Weird, right? I don't know, but I don't trust him..."


	2. Warming Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kevin has a few... Unique habits, but Carlos feels like some progress is being made.

The radio station built, a makeshift science lab created, a room for the both of them to sleep in, and an unfinished kitchen. This was the result of the productive lifestyle that Kevin maintained.Carlos had of course helped with the construction of the lab and the kitchen, but he was usually busy conducting experiments, and Kevin would get most of it done during the night, as it was alarming how little he actually slept. The scientist thought it best not to question this, though, as everyone had different hours they liked to sleep, and who was he to judge? Well, he thought this until he awoke one morning to cooked cactus and some sort of scrambled egg being placed on the small night stand between their beds, when he _knew_ they didn’t have any food left when he went to sleep the night before.

“Kevin… How long have you been up?” Carlos questioned hesitantly, running a hand through his dark hair as he yawned and sat up in bed, the quilt over him sliding down his bare chest to his waist.

“Uh… Since yesterday morning. Why?” The radio host swiveled around in the doorway to face Carlos, fresh blood staining his shirt and arms, as well as a minimal amount around his mouth. 

“You didn’t sleep at all last night? Aren’t you tired?” Carlos picked up his ‘plate’ (really just a large piece of de-thorned cactus) of food, and began eating.

“No, I don’t usually get tired as long as I’m being productive.” He smiled brightly. Hm. Now that was weird. Surely being so busy all the time was bound to exhaust someone, especially considering all the walking that must have been done to retrieve the food, but perhaps not with Kevin. “Okay. Thank you for the breakfast.”

Kevin exited the room, and Carlos reached over to grab his recorder, shoveling down the rest of the food as he heard the radio host in the other room, starting to work on the kitchen. Clicking the recorder on, he began speaking, quietly so that Kevin wouldn’t hear. “No science updates yet today. I’ve just woken up and eaten the breakfast that Kevin prepared for me. I don’t know if he’s just scared or anxious or something, he certainly doesn’t seem like it, but he didn’t sleep last night, and he’s gone back to work on the kitchen despite how early it is. He usually doesn’t sleep much most nights, he’s always up late and always wakes up before me. In fact... I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sleep. I may wait it out a few days and see what his sleeping schedule is like. I probably won’t sleep tonight, to see if he sleeps after already having a night of not sleeping. I’m thinking he may not be completely human... Also did I mention that he has no eyes?... Update on this tomorrow.” Carlos switched off the recorder and got dressed, sliding on his lab coat and heading out to the kitchen to check on Kevin, who had a lizard tail dangling from the corner of his mouth as he work on perfecting the area where they had built a fireplace to cook with.

“Um, Kevin, how’s the kitchen coming?” He inquired nervously, watching with wide eyes as Kevin slurped the lizard tail into his mouth with an audible swallow.

“It’s coming along nicely. This area is almost done, but I don’t think I’m going to build a roof because that could catch fire too easily when cooking, and it hasn’t rained yet, at least not while I’ve been here, so I don’t think there’s any danger. Right?”

“ _Right_... I’m going to go outside and study the sand for a while. Which way did you go to find that cactus for breakfast this morning?”

Kevin pointed off to the left. “That way, I think. There’s more of them if you were planning on doing experiments on them or something.”

“Thank you.” Carlos gave a nod of thanks and made his leave, taking his goggles, recorder, and a device for analyzing the chemical makeup of objects, which he would be using on the sand and the cacti, and any other interesting objects he might find out there in the Desert Otherworld.

The sun had already begun to set when Carlos returned, carrying a slightly rusted toaster, two brand new forks, a dirty quilt, and a still-packaged pair of scissors, some random items he had found on his way to and from the cacti that Kevin had harvested earlier. Upon stepping into the kitchen, though, the scientist stopped dead in his tracks, looking around in horror and accidentally dropping the forks and toaster to the floor when he saw the walls. The walls were splattered in blood, clearly fresh, some of it still wet and running in crimson droplets down the surfaces. “K-Kevin…?” His voice quivered as he stood there, frozen in place.

The radio host stepped into the room a few seconds later, a dead and bloodied lizard clutched in his fingers. “Oh, Carlos! You’re back! How do you like my decorations?” He seemed surprisingly proud of his work, and Carlos couldn’t help but wonder how many lizards he had killed to get this blood, let alone what happened to their poor bloodless carcasses.

“I… Kevin… Is that barbecue sauce?” The substance on the walls was obviously not anything close to barbecue sauce, but the scientist decided that Kevin deserved the benefit of the doubt, despite how… terrifying this entire situation was.

“Oh no, no. It’s just blood. It’s nice though, isn’t it?” He sighed happily, glancing around the room.

“I-It’s lovely, Kevin. Really. This is, um, unique. And-And very creative of you.” Carlos was admittedly a little afraid of what Kevin would do if he didn’t compliment the new ‘decorations.’

“Aw, thank you! I wanted to get the whole place done before you got back, but I didn’t even have enough time to get to the bedroom.” The Voice took notice of the items on the floor, leaning down to pick up the toaster and forks with a giggle, dropping the half-empty lizard corpse on the floor. “Whoops. Looks like you dropped these. I’m sure they’ll make great additions to the kitchen."

“Y-Yeah, I thought they’d be useful. I’m really not sure where all these things are coming from. They’re in such a wide range and none of them are really necessarily related apart from the fact that they’re all items you would use at home.” The scientist looked intently at the toaster before meeting Kevin’s eyes again, speaking nervously. “And there’s really no need to, um, use up all your valuable time decorating the bedroom. The kitchen already looks lovely, and I’d hate for you to waste all that delicious lizard, right?”

“Right! That’s so considerate of you! Here, I’ll help you get all this stuff put away.” And by that, Kevin meant place the stuff on the one counter in the kitchen until they had cause to use the items. Carlos draped the quilt over the back of a chair Kevin had built earlier that day, and left the rest of the items on the counter, careful not to touch any of the walls, or even go near them for that matter. “You look exhausted. Why don’t you go rest, and I’ll make you something to eat?” The radio host removed the dusty goggles from the scientist’s face, slipping Carlos’s glasses out of his lab coat pocket and sliding them onto his face. “There. Now go lie down. Try out the quilt.”

Carlos was never sure why Kevin was so nice to him. After all, he had tried to make it clear that he wanted to keep his distance and keep some very obvious boundaries between the two, but Kevin didn’t seem to mind at all, and just continued to pamper him. Even so, after spending hours analyzing different cacti and grains of sand, not to mention having to log all of that research, he was exhausted, and bed and food sounded very nice at the moment. “Thank you.” He gave the other man a smile and headed into the bedroom with the quilt, hefting it onto the bed before stripping off his lab coat, flannel shirt, and pants. He slid under the covers of the bed in only his undershirt and boxers, closing his eyes to relieve them of the strain he had put on them all day while intensely focusing on his work.

Soon enough, Kevin came in with a ‘plate’ of some sort of unidentifiable desert fruit, a pile of sludge that vaguely resembled oatmeal, and a plastic cup full of water. “This was all I could manage. I wanted to come back before you woke up this morning so that you could have breakfast, so I only got enough for two meals. I can go search for some other food while you’re resting.”

Carlos sat up and blinked his eyes open, rubbing them to wake himself up a bit more as he took the plate and placed the cup aside on the nightstand. “Thanks, Kevin.” He poked at the mound that had the consistency of oatmeal, before taking a hesitant bite, swallowing it down quickly. To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Bland and practically tasteless? Sure. But not bad. “Kevin… Have you eaten anything today?” He couldn’t help but be concerned about the other, it was just in his nature to be caring, despite how frightening Kevin was.

“No, I’ve been busy repairing and decorating the kitchen. I wanted to get it done before you came back…” He admitted, looking down awkwardly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Kevin was trying to impress Carlos in his own sick and twisted way.

“I… Appreciate that. But please, get something to eat before you leave. Here, take this…” The scientist held out the fruit to Kevin. It was clearly a rare fruit that had taken the other man a long time to find, and Carlos had been looking forward to eating it, but Kevin needed to eat something, and he figured the fruit would at least up his blood sugar if it didn’t provide him with any proper nutrients.

The Voice took the fruit, nodding at Carlos. “Thank you. I-I’ll eat and then go, I suppose.” He smiled, cheeks warm, and stepped out of the room to eat his tiny sustenance before leaving, making a long trek into the flat desert in search of food.

Carlos slept for a few hours while Kevin was gone, waking up only when the radio host happened to come back inside, his arms full of fresh cacti, eggs from some sort of creature indigenous to this environment, and another single fruit. By this point, it was dark out, the stars starting to form constellations in the sky above their makeshift home.

The scientist got out of bed and pulled on his flannel to block out the chilly night air, walking out to the kitchen and smiling sleepily at Kevin, his hair a hot mess. “Hey. Find anything good? I’ll cook you something if you want to go rest. I know you’ve been _really_ busy lately.”

It became apparent in the moonlight just how dark the circles under Kevin’s eyeless sockets had gotten, but he still shook his head. “Oh, no thanks. I’m not tired. Work to do still. I brought you this…” He held out the single magenta colored fruit like a precious gift, his sharp-toothed smile seeming gentler than usual.

“Thank you, Kevin, but you really should be getting some rest.” Carlos took the fruit with a nod of gratitude, deciding he’d save it until later that night, as he would surely be up studying. The air was starting to grow colder, the breeze becoming steadier through the fragile walls of the house, and he pulled the flannel tighter around himself for warmth.

“I… Guess I could go lay down for a minute, or two, but I really shouldn’t stop working. I don’t want to break my habits of productiveness.” Kevin seemed to almost feel a sense of discomfort at the thought, his body language expressing just how foreign of a thought that was to him.

“Kevin… I don’t know what they did to you in Desert Bluffs, but you don’t have to worry about that now. You look exhausted, and… I really think you should get some rest.” His caramel tones were tender, encouraging, as he placed a hand on Kevin’s back and led him into the bedroom. “Here, just sit down while I cook something for you, alright? 

The radio host didn’t seem to mind letting himself be led, and took a seat on the edge of his bed, nodding at Carlos’s words before focusing his gaze on the floor, his blood-stained hands extremely fidgety. The scientist decided not to address this issue, hoping that if he just left Kevin to relax for a while, he may be able to cleanse himself of those ridiculous needs for productivity and work. A few minutes later, he re-entered the room with a plate of scrambled eggs with chopped up cactus inside, having tried to make a new twist on the two food items that had become their staples in the past few weeks.

“Thank you for making this for me, Carlos.” Taking the food, Kevin managed to finish the meal within the span of a few minutes, evidently extremely hungry. Carlos smiled a little at that and set the cactus plate aside as Kevin removed his suspenders, button-up shirt, and trousers, slipping under the thin blanket he had, his golden tentacle tattoos squirming and retracting to rest around from his back to his abdomen, seeking the warmth of the core of his body. Lifting up the heavy quilt, Carlos laid it over the radio host and went to sit in his own bed, picking up the journal he had been logging in along with a pen to make some important notes on the sides of the pages. Fortunately, Kevin’s gratitude for the quilt was quite obvious, as he let out a hum of content and curled himself up under it, falling asleep in a matter of seconds. Carlos stayed up the rest of the night, watching over Kevin to make sure he slept, as well as starting a new journal filled with all of the observations he had made about Kevin, figuring it would be less wasteful if he wrote these things down instead of doing recordings. That way he could save his tapes for real scientific research, and his thoughts could be in an isolated journal that would focus solely on Kevin, as he wasn’t really part of any scientific experiment Carlos was doing. These matters were more… Personal.

_I’ve decided to begin writing in a separate journal about Kevin. Although he is not part of an experiment, he is fascinating, and I think his behavior deserves to be documented. If not for my own scientific and personal interest, than for his. I don’t know what happened in Desert Bluffs, where he used to live, but he constantly talks about how much they valued productivity, and this Smiling God, and I think he may just need to be exposed to different things. Time here in the Desert Otherworld with me is doing him good. Maybe if I could just figure out some way to rid him of his obsession with blood and eating live animals, I could figure out a way to really help him. Tonight, we made some progress, but I’m hoping that future endeavors could fix him completely. Not that he needs to be ‘fixed’ per say, but his behavior is not what most would call normal. At first, I was terrified of him, and found his habits to be frightening, but I think with my help, he really could change into something better. Someone less violent and more stable, who doesn’t crave productivity like he does..._

_He’s starting to remind me more of Cecil every day..._


End file.
